Saturday, October 08, 2011

165. Gilad Atzmon

Gilad Atzmon's new book likened to Protocols of Zion, in New York
Magazine review

[ Peter Myers's 2 october 2012 newsletter. ]

(1) Commentary Magazine targets John Mearsheimer for endorsing Gilad's
new book
(2) The Guardian publishes a hostile review of Gilad's new book The
Wandering Who?
(3) Gilad Atzmon's book likened to Protocols of Zion, in New York
Magazine review, by reviewer who didn't read it
(4) Goldberg vs. Mearsheimer, by Gilad Atzmon
(5) Gilad says that his book The Wandering Who is at the top of the
Amazon sales rank
(6) Mearsheimer responds to smear in Goldberg’s review of Gilad's book
(7) Is Gilad becoming a Holocaust Revisionist? - Robert Faurisson
(8) Dr Joel Hayward in the Firing Line Again - Kerry Bolton

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have spent much of the last few years
since the publication of their infamous screed The Israel Lobby posing
as victims of vicious smears. They have claimed their careers were hurt
by their willingness to denounce Israel and its supporters and cried
bloody murder over the fact many commentators saw a clear connection
between their absurd arguments that a vast conspiracy of allies of
Zionism was manipulating American policy.

But it’s going to be just a little harder for one of this duo to assert
his innocence when it comes to charges of Jew-hatred. Mearsheimer is
rightly being called to account for his endorsement of a new book by a
Holocaust denier. As Jeffrey Goldberg noted in The Atlantic, after years
of pretending he is no anti-Semite, Mearsheimer isn’t even “bothering to
make believe anymore.”

The author of the book Mearsheimer admires is Gilad Atzmon, an
ex-Israeli who not only doubts the truth of the Holocaust but also
thinks the Jews persecuted Hitler and Nazi persecution of the Jews was
justified. For Atzmon, any expression of Jewish identity is tantamount
to racism. He believes Israel is worse than Nazi Germany. His hatred of
his own people has even motivated him to claim medieval blood libels
might have been true, and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion provides
historical insights about the Jews.

When blogger Adam Holland contacted Mearsheimer about his praise of
Atzmon, the University of Chicago professor didn’t back down from
writing his blurb: “I have no reason to amend it or embellish it, as it
accurately reflects my view of the book.”

The Israel Lobby was itself a typical example of anti-Semitic invective
in the way it sought to delegitimize Israel’s American supporters and to
single them out as sinister forces undermining democracy. But because
its authors were two distinguished academics, they were able to cloak
their prejudice in more respectable garb. One can only hope
Mearsheimer’s endorsement of Atzmon helps to strip away that unjustified
veneer of respectability that continues to attach to the authors’ work.

(2) The Guardian publishes a hostile review of Gilad's new book The
Wandering Who?

The Palestinian cause is hindered, not helped, when the left fails to
notice or confront anti-semitism

o Andy Newman
o guardian.co.uk, Sunday 25 September 2011 19.30 BST

Jazz saxophonist Gilad Atzmon is a former soldier in the Israeli army
and advocate of the Palestinian cause. Photograph: Eamonn Mccabe

A letter was published in response to this article on 26 September 2011:
"Antisemitism and the left – some facts"

Gilad Atzmon is a world renowned jazz musician, and a former soldier in
the Israeli army, so his advocacy of the Palestinian cause is guaranteed
to draw attention. Indeed, a small leftwing publisher, Zero Books, has
commissioned Atzmon to write a book on the Jews as part of an otherwise
entirely credible series by respected left figures such as Richard
Seymour, Nina Power and Laurie Penny.

The trouble is that Atzmon has often argued that the Zionist oppression
of the Palestinians is attributable not to the bellicose politics of the
Israeli state, but to Jewish lobbies and Jewish power. Atzmon's
antisemitic writings include, for example, a 2009 article – Tribal
Marxism for Dummies – in which he explains that while "Marxism is a
universal paradigm, its Jewish version is very different. It is there to
mould Marxist dialectic into a Jewish subservient precept". Atzmon
argues that it is merely a "Judeo-centric pseudo intellectual setting
which aims at political power" and that "Jewish Marxism is there to …
stop scrutiny of Jewish power and Jewish lobbying".

This is a wild conspiracy argument, dripping with contempt for Jews.
Sadly, Atzmon's status as a celebrity advocate of the Palestinian cause
means that he has been feted by some on the left. The Socialist Workers
party, for example, used to invite him to attend their public events,
and Indymedia has robustly defended Atzmon, even banning people who
object to him.

Sadly, the left does not have an unblemished record on opposing
antisemitism. In 2009, for example, the respected American leftist
publication Counterpunch published an article by Alison Weir of the
organisation If Americans Knew defending the unsubstantiated and
implausible claims made by the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet about
Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinians in Gaza to harvest their organs.

Weir implied, with no evidence, that Israel is at the centre of
international organ smuggling. She then explicitly argued that the
medieval "blood libel" – that Jews kill Christian children – has a basis
in fact. Elsewhere, more than 3 million people have watched on YouTube
the antisemitic film Zeitgeist: the Movie, despite its recycling of
paranoia about a Jewish plot for world domination.

Sometimes well-meaning people fail to recognise antisemitism when they
encounter it, because they are not attuned to the linguistic codes in
which it is expressed, or are unaware of the cultural themes of
anti-Judaic prejudice being drawn upon. Anti-Judaic bigotry predates
modern racism, and is embedded in our culture. In pre-capitalist Europe
Christians were prohibited from usury – lending money for interest.
Medieval Jewry thus played a social role as financiers. The enduring
negative stereotype of Jews as "greedy" therefore derived from medieval
opposition to finance capital. As Martin Luther wrote in 1543: "[The
Jews] let us work in the sweat of our brow to earn money and property
while they sit behind the stove, idle away the time, fart, and roast
pears … with their accursed usury they hold us and our property captive.
… Thus they are our masters and we are their servants, with our
property, our sweat, and our labour."

Luther may have little direct influence on modern antisemitism, but the
identification of Jews as trying to control the world through money
still has widespread currency, and informs the idea of a "Jewish lobby"
that dictates American support for Israel.

The 19th century saw anti-Judaic feeling given a gloss of
pseudo-science, with the birth of modern racialised antisemitism. This
made an important difference because it created a racial category for
the Jews. Whereas medieval anti-Judaism had regarded Jewishness as a
question of faith, and therefore believed that Jews stopped being Jews
if they accepted Christ, in the 19th century Jews came to be seen as
aliens in Europe.

The Jews have always regarded themselves as a nation without a home, and
it should come as no surprise that in response to such antisemitism
Jewish political nationalism arose across Europe in the 19th century, or
that Zionism then gave expression to the aspiration for a Jewish nation
state. The actually existing Israel is founded upon displacement of
another people, and there will never be peace and security until the
Palestinians achieve justice. However, the cause of the Palestinians is
hindered, not helped, by association with antisemitism.

It is incumbent upon the left and the Palestinian solidarity movement to
both be aware of the conscious effort of far-right antisemites to
infiltrate the movement, and to vigorously oppose and exclude
antisemites. We would not hesitate to condemn racists, homophobes or
sexists, and must be equally robust in opposing anti-Jewish hate-speech.

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(3) Gilad Atzmon's book likened to Protocols of Zion, in New York
Magazine review, by reviewer who didn't read it

A few years ago, The Israel Lobby, by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, provoked a nasty contretemps among liberals. Critics, including me, saw it as fevered conspiracy-mongering that amounted to an attack on the political rights of American Jews. There were few defenders per se — even staunch Israel critics conceded the shoddiness of their argument — but the defense of Walt and Mearsheimer's rights became a crusade for many liberal intellectuals. Ezra Klein, for instance, repeatedlydescribed the criticism of the two as a cynical smear campaign designed to silence them, and later wrote that the unfair attack on Walt and Mearsheimer motivated him to write about the Middle East.

Now Mearsheimer is back in the news, and not in a way that's going to make his defenders (or again, more precisely, the critics of his critics) feel very good.

Mearsheimer has blurbed a book by Gilad Atzmon, a self-described "self-hating Jew" with some ugly beliefs. Here's Atzmon invoking the broad correctness of "The protocols of the Elders of Zion":

[W]e must begin to take the accusation that the Jewish people are trying to control the world very seriously. It is beyond doubt that Zionists, the most radical, racist and nationalistic Jews around, have already managed to turn America into an Israeli mission force. The world's number one super power is there to support the Jewish state's wealth and security matters. The one-sided pro-Zionist take on the Israeli¬ Palestinian conflict, the American veto against every 'anti-Israeli' UN resolution, the war against Iraq and now the militant intentions against Syria, all prove beyond doubt that it is Zionist interests that America is serving. American Jewry makes any debate on whether the 'Protocols of the elder of Zion' are an authentic document or rather a forgery irrelevant. American Jews do try to control the world, by proxy. So far they are doing pretty well for themselves at least. Whether the Americans enjoy the deterioration of their state's affairs will no doubt be revealed soon.

65 years after the liberation of Auschwitz we should reclaim our history and ask why? Why were the Jews hated? Why did European people stand up against their next door neighbours? Why are the Jews hated in the Middle East, surely they had a chance to open a new page in their troubled history? If they genuinely planned to do so, as the early Zionists claimed, why did they fail? Why did America tighten its immigration laws amid the growing danger to European Jews? We should also ask for what purpose do the holocaust denial laws serve? What is the holocaust religion there to conceal? As long as we fail to ask questions, we will be subjected to Zionists and their Neocons agents’ plots.

Now, obviously, the fact that Mearsheimer endorsed Atzmon's book does not mean Mearsheimer has endorsed every one of Atzmon's beliefs. Mearsheimer could certainly choose to endorse this particular book without defending Atzmon as a general thinker. Yet here is Mearsheimer today, writing on Walt's blog, defending Atzmon as a general thinker. And the book itself contains such charming observations as:

You may wonder at this stage whether I regard the credit crunch as a Zionist plot or even a Jewish conspiracy. In fact the opposite is the case. It isn’t a plot and certainly not a conspiracy for it was all in the open.

and:

Fagin is the ultimate plunderer, a child exploiter and usurer. Shylock is the blood-thirsty merchant. With Fagin and Shylock in mind, the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians seems to be just a further event in an endless hellish continuum.

Now, I haven't read the book and I don't know the context of these quotes. But unless the context is something like, "The following paragraph was inserted surreptitiously by a Nazi infiltrator at the printing house and it's too late to excise it but please don't associate me with these crazy statements," then it probably can't help much.

The supposed logic behind those liberals who insist Walt and Mearsheimer are the victims of a smear campaign is that legitimizing their views helps open the "Overton window" to less wacky left-wing views. I don't see the legitimacy when conservatives play this game with Glenn Beck, the supply-siders, climate science skeptics, and a host of other wingnuts cynically used by the less-crazy Republicans, and I don't support it on the left, either.

Professor John Mearsheimer is subject to a Zionist-trans-Atlantic-attack
for supporting my latest book The Wandering Who.

Earlier this year John Mearsheimer, the highly respected international
relations theorist and Professor of Political Science at the University
of Chicago, wrote the following preliminary front matter for my book:

‘Gilad Atzmon has written a fascinating and provocative book on Jewish
identity in the modern world. He shows how assimilation and liberalism
are making it increasingly difficult for Jews in the Diaspora to
maintain a powerful sense of their 'Jewishness.' Panicked Jewish
leaders, he argues, have turned to Zionism (blind loyalty to Israel) and
scaremongering (the threat of another Holocaust) to keep the tribe
united and distinct from the surrounding goyim. As Atzmon’s own case
demonstrates, this strategy is not working and is causing many Jews
great anguish. The Wandering Who? should be widely read by Jews and
non-Jews alike.’

It seems as if the Zio-cons on both sides of the pond are now in a state
of panic -- In an obviously orchestrated attack, the Zionist mouthpiece
The Jewish Chronicle of London, the Islamophobic Award winning ‘Harry’s
Place’ and the ex-Israeli concentration camp guard Jeffrey Goldberg* ,
all launched a typical Hasbara smear & intimidation campaign, in which
they labeled both Professor Mearsheimer and myself anti Semites. I was
also called a ‘neo Nazi’, a ‘Hitler apologist,’ a ‘Holocaust denier’ and
a ‘hatemonger’.

To be honest, it is somewhat amusing that an ex concentration camp
guard like Goldberg should label me a ‘Hitler apologist’ or a ‘Holocaust
denier’: after all, since Goldberg is an ardent pro-war Zionist who
openly and enthusiastically supports a Jews-only, racist, expansionist
state, it is clear that he is actually the one who is an advocate of a
distinctly Nazi-like ideology and practice.

In addition, I learned from Goldberg that Adam Holland (yet another
notorious Zionist zealot), also cannot quite believe that Professor’
Mearsheimer would endorse my book.

Adam Holland wrote: “I had trouble believing that a distinguished
professor at one of the world's greatest universities would link himself
to a hatemonger like Atzmon. So I sent Professor Mearsheimer an email
quoting the blurb and asking him to verify its accuracy. I also gave him
an opportunity to amend it or add to it. Here's what he ( Mearsheimer)
wrote back:

"The blurb below is the one I wrote for ‘The Wandering who’ and I have
no reason to amend it or embellish it, as it accurately reflects my view
of the book." John J. Mearsheimer

What is clear to the rest of us is that our Zionist detractors are
fighting a lost battle. I really wonder what they hope to achieve: after
all, those who have taken the time to actually read my work know very
well that there is no hatred, no anti Semitism, and no racism in my
entire body of work. Instead, I believe that truth is a dynamic process
-- I believe in the power of reason and in free debate.

If Jeffrey Goldberg has any dignity left at all, then he should start
again -- He should apologise to Professor Mearsheimer, myself, the
Palestinians, and to humanity. He would do better to also try to present
an argument, and if he actually has anything to say, he would be best
advised to then learn how to argue and encounter in debate.

(5) Gilad says that his book The Wandering Who is at the top of the
Amazon sales rank

Due to the publication of my new book The Wandering Who and a worldwide
defamation campaign to stop it, many of my recent postings were
concerned with matters to do with the leagues that were formed against
me (Zionists, Jewish ‘Anti’ Zionists and the odd Sabbath Marxist Goyim).

The good news is that my publisher, Zero books, didn’t surrender at all.
If anything they probably realise how truthful The Wandering Who is. I
am also pretty sure that they are all glad to see the book on the
Amazon.com top sales rank for the last two weeks. Also the list of
intellectuals, writers and activists who stand up for me is astonishing
and reassuring. None of the endorsers surrendered to the Jewish ‘anti’
Zionist intimidation campaign.

However, I would like to use this opportunity to apologise. If any of
you are annoyed by the amount of ‘self-centred’ materials published
through this list, let me assure you, within a week or two, I will start
to write again about a wider list of topics. This battle had to be won
and we won it.

Peace & Love

Gilad

(6) Mearsheimer responds to smear in Goldberg’s review of Gilad's book

Ever since John Mearsheimer and I began writing about the Israel lobby,
some of our critics have leveled various personal charges against us.
These attacks rarely addressed the substance of what we wrote -- a tacit
concession that both facts and logic were on our side -- but instead
accused us of being anti-Semites and conspiracy theorists. They used
these false charges to try to discredit and/or marginalize us, and to
distract people from the important issues of U.S. Middle East policy
that we had raised.

The latest example of this tactic is a recent blog post from Jeffrey
Goldberg, where he accused my co-author of endorsing a book by an
alleged Holocaust denier and Nazi sympathizer. Goldberg has
well-established record of making things up about us, and this latest
episode is consistent with his usual approach. I asked Professor
Mearsheimer if he wanted to respond to Goldberg's sally, and he sent the
following reply.

John Mearsheimer writes:

In a certain sense, it is hard not to be impressed by the energy and
imagination that Jeffrey Goldberg devotes to smearing Steve Walt and me.
Although he clearly disagrees with our views about U.S.-Israel relations
and the role of the Israel lobby, he does not bother to engage what we
actually wrote in any meaningful way. Indeed, given what he writes about
us, I am not even sure he has read our book or related articles. Instead
of challenging the arguments and evidence that we presented, his modus
operandi is to misrepresent and distort our views, in a transparent
attempt to portray us as rabid anti-Semites.

His latest effort along these lines comes in a recent blog post, where
he seizes on a dust jacket blurb I wrote for a new book by Gilad Atzmon
titled The Wandering Who? A Study of Jewish Identity Politics. Here is
what I said in my blurb:

Gilad Atzmon has written a fascinating and provocative book on Jewish
identity in the modern world. He shows how assimilation and liberalism
are making it increasingly difficult for Jews in the Diaspora to
maintain a powerful sense of their 'Jewishness.' Panicked Jewish
leaders, he argues, have turned to Zionism (blind loyalty to Israel) and
scaremongering (the threat of another Holocaust) to keep the tribe
united and distinct from the surrounding goyim. As Atzmon's own case
demonstrates, this strategy is not working and is causing many Jews
great anguish. The Wandering Who? should be widely read by Jews and
non-Jews alike.

The book, as my blurb makes clear, is an extended meditation on Jewish
identity in the Diaspora and how it relates to the Holocaust, Israel,
and Zionism. There is no question that the book is provocative, both in
terms of its central argument and the overly hot language that Atzmon
sometimes uses. But it is also filled with interesting insights that
make the reader think long and hard about an important subject. Of
course, I do not agree with everything that he says in the book -- what
blurber does? -- but I found it thought provoking and likely to be of
considerable interest to Jews and non-Jews, which is what I said in my
brief comment.

Goldberg maintains that Atzmon is a categorically reprehensible person,
and accuses him of being a Holocaust denier and an apologist for Hitler.
These are two of the most devastating charges that can be leveled
against anyone. According to Goldberg, the mere fact that I blurbed
Atzmon's book is decisive evidence that I share Atzmon's supposedly
odious views. This indictment of me is captured in the title of
Goldberg's piece: "John Mearsheimer Endorses a Hitler Apologist and
Holocaust Revisionist."

This charge is so ludicrous that it is hard to know where to start my
response. But let me begin by noting that I have taught countless
University of Chicago students over the years about the Holocaust and
about Hitler's role in it. Nobody who has been in my classes would ever
accuse me of being sympathetic to Holocaust deniers or making excuses
for what Hitler did to European Jews. Not surprisingly, those loathsome
charges have never been leveled against me until Goldberg did so last week.

Equally important, Gilad Atzmon is neither a Holocaust denier nor an
apologist for Hitler. Consider the following excerpt from The Wandering
Who?

As much as I was a sceptic youngster, I was also horrified by the
Holocaust. In the 1970s Holocaust survivors were part of our social
landscape. They were our neighbours, we met them in our family
gatherings, in the classroom, in politics, in the corner shop. The dark
numbers tattooed on their white arms never faded away. It always had a
chilling effect. . . . It was actually the internalization of the
meaning of the Holocaust that transformed me into a strong opponent of
Israel and Jewish-ness. It is the Holocaust that eventually made me a
devoted supporter of Palestinian rights, resistance and the Palestinian
right of return" (pp. 185-186).

It seems unequivocally clear to me from those sentences that Atzmon
firmly believes that the Holocaust occurred and was a horrific tragedy.
I cannot find evidence in his book or in his other writings that
indicate he "traffics in Holocaust denial."

The real issue for Atzmon -- and this is reflected in the excerpt from
his blog post that Goldberg quotes from -- is how the Holocaust is
interpreted and used by the Jewish establishment. Atzmon has three
complaints. He believes that it is used to justify Israel's brutal
treatment of the Palestinians and to fend off criticism of Israel. This
is an argument made by many other writers, including former Knesset
speaker Avraham Burg, historian Peter Novick, and political scientist
Norman Finkelstein. Atzmon also rejects the claim that the Holocaust is
exceptional, which is a position that other respected scholars have
held. There have been other genocides in world history, after all, and
this whole issue was actively debated in the negotiations that led to
the building of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. Whatever one
thinks of Atzmon's position on this subject, it is hardly beyond the pale.

Finally, Atzmon is angry about the fact that it is difficult to raise
certain questions about the causes and the conduct of the Holocaust
without being personally attacked. These are all defensible if
controversial positions to hold, which is not to say one has to agree
with any of them. But in no way is he questioning that the Holocaust
happened or denying its importance. In fact, his view is clear from one
of Atzmon's sentences that Goldberg quotes: "We should strip the
holocaust of its Judeo-centric exceptional status and treat it as an
historical chapter that belongs to a certain time and place." Note that
Atzmon is talking about "the holocaust" in a way that makes it clear he
has no doubts about its occurrence, and the passage from The Wandering
Who? cited above makes it clear that he has no doubts about its
importance or its tragic dimensions; he merely believes it should be
seen in a different way. Again, one need not agree with Atzmon to
recognize that Goldberg has badly misrepresented his position.

There is also no evidence that I could find in The Wandering Who? to
support Goldberg's claim that Atzmon is an apologist for Hitler or that
he believes "Jews persecuted Hitler" and in so doing helped trigger the
Holocaust. There is actually little discussion of Hitler in Atzmon's
book, and the only discussion of interactions between Hitler and the
Jews concerns the efforts of German Zionists to work out a modus vivendi
with the Nazis. (pp. 162-165) This is why Goldberg is forced to go to
one of Atzmon's blog posts to make the case that he is an apologist for
Hitler.

Before I examine the substance of that charge, there is an important
issue that needs to be addressed directly. Goldberg's indictment of
Atzmon does not rely on anything that he wrote in The Wandering Who?
Indeed, Goldberg's blog post is silent on whether he has actually read
the book. If he did read it, he apparently could not find any evidence
to support his indictment of Atzmon. Instead, he relied exclusively on
evidence culled from Atzmon's own blog postings. That is why Goldberg's
assault on me steers clear of criticizing Atzmon's book, which is what I
blurbed. In short, he falsely accuses me of lending support to a
Holocaust denier and defender of Hitler on the basis of writings that I
did not read and did not comment upon.

This tactic puts me in a difficult position. I was asked to review
Atzmon's book and see whether I would be willing to blurb it. This is
something I do frequently, and in every case I focus on the book at hand
and not on the personality of the author or their other writings. In
other words, I did not read any of Atzmon's blog postings before I wrote
my blurb. And just for the record, I have not met him and did not
communicate with him before I was asked to review The Wandering Who? I
read only the book and wrote a blurb that deals with it alone.

Goldberg, however, has shifted the focus onto what Atzmon has written on
his blog. I discuss a couple of examples below, but I will not defend
his blog output in detail for two reasons. First, I do not know what
Atzmon may have said in all of his past blog posts and other writings or
in the various talks that he has given over the years. Second, what he
says in those places is not relevant to what I did, which was simply to
read and react to his book.

Let me now turn to the specific claim that Atzmon is an "apologist for
Hitler." Again, I am somewhat reluctant to do this, because this charge
forces me to defend what Atzmon said in one of his blog posts. But given
the prominence of the charge in Goldberg's indictment of Atzmon (and
me), I cannot let it pass.

Plus, I see that Walter Russell Mead, who is also fond of smearing Steve
Walt and me, has put this charge up in bright lights on his own blog.
Picking up on Goldberg's original post, Mead describes Atzmon's argument
this way: "poor Adolf Hitler's actions against German Jews only came
after US Jews called a boycott on German goods following Hitler's
appointment as German Chancellor. Gosh -- if it weren't for those pushy,
aggressive Jews and their annoying boycotts, the Holocaust might not
have happened!"

It is hard to imagine any sane person making such an argument, and
Atzmon never does. Goldberg refers to a blog post that Atzmon wrote on
March 25, 2010, written in response to news at the time that AIPAC had
"decided to mount pressure" on President Obama. After describing what
was happening with Obama, Atzmon notes that this kind of behavior is
hardly unprecedented. In his words, "Jewish lobbies certainly do not
hold back when it comes to pressuring states, world leaders and even
superpowers." There is no question that this statement is accurate and
not even all that controversial; Tom Friedman said as much in the New
York Times a couple of weeks ago.

In the second half of this post, Atzmon says that AIPAC's behavior
reminds him of the March 1933 Jewish boycott of German goods, which
preceded Hitler's decision on March 28, 1933 to boycott Jewish stores
and goods. His basic point is that the Jewish boycott had negative
consequences, which it did. In Atzmon's narrative -- and this is a very
important theme in his book -- Jews are not simply passive victims of
other people's actions. On the contrary, he believes Jews have
considerable agency and their actions are not always wise. One can agree
or disagree with his views about the wisdom of the Jewish boycott -- and
I happen to think he's wrong about it -- but he is not arguing that the
Jews were "persecuting Hitler" and that this alleged "persecution" led
to the Holocaust. In fact, he says nothing about the Holocaust in his
post and he certainly does not justify in any way the murder of six
million Jews.

Let me make one additional point about Goldberg's mining of Atzmon's
blog posts. Goldberg ends his attack on me with the following quotation
from a Feb. 19 blog post by Atzmon: "I believe that from [a] certain
ideological perspective, Israel is actually far worse than Nazi
Germany." That quotation certainly makes Atzmon look like he has lost
his mind and that nothing he has written could be trusted. But Goldberg
has misrepresented what Atzmon really said, which is one of his standard
tactics. Specifically, he quotes only part of a sentence from Atzmon's
blog post; but when you look at the entire sentence, you see that Atzmon
is making a different, and far more nuanced point. The entire sentence
reads: "Indeed, I believe that from [a] certain ideological perspective,
Israel is actually far worse than Nazi Germany, for unlike Nazi Germany,
Israel is a democracy and that implies that Israeli citizens are
complicit in Israeli atrocities." This is not an argument I would make,
but what Atzmon is saying is quite different from the way Goldberg
portrays it.

Finally, let me address the charge that Atzmon himself is an anti-Semite
and a self-hating Jew. The implication of this accusation, of course, is
that I must be an anti-Semite too (I can't be a self-hating Jew) because
I agreed to blurb Atzmon's book. I do not believe that Atzmon is an
anti-Semite, although that charge is thrown around so carelessly these
days that it has regrettably lost much of its meaning. If one believes
that anyone who criticizes Israel is an anti-Semite, then Atzmon clearly
fits in that category. But that definition is foolish -- no country is
perfect or above criticism-and not worth taking seriously.

The more important and interesting issue is whether Atzmon is a
self-hating Jew. Here the answer is unequivocally yes. He openly
describes himself in this way and he sees himself as part of a long
dissident tradition that includes famous figures such as Marx and
Spinoza. What is going on here?

The key to understanding Atzmon is that he rejects the claim that Jews
are the "Chosen People." His main target, as he makes clear at the start
of the book, is not with Judaism per se or with people who "happen to be
of Jewish origin." Rather, his problem is with "those who put their
Jewish-ness over and above all of their other traits." Or to use other
words of his: "I will present a harsh criticism of Jewish politics and
identity ... This book doesn't deal with Jews as a people or ethnicity."
(pp. 15-16)

In other words, Atzmon is a universalist who does not like the
particularism that characterizes Zionism and which has a rich tradition
among Jews and any number of other groups. He is the kind of person who
intensely dislikes nationalism of any sort. Princeton professor Richard
Falk captures this point nicely in his own blurb for the book, where he
writes: "Atzmon has written an absorbing and moving account of his
journey from hard-core Israeli nationalist to a de-Zionized patriot of
humanity."

Atzmon's basic point is that Jews often talk in universalistic terms,
but many of them think and act in particularistic terms. One might say
they talk like liberals but act like nationalists. Atzmon will have none
of this, which is why he labels himself a self-hating Jew. He fervently
believes that Jews are not the "Chosen People" and that they should not
privilege their "Jewish-ness" over their other human traits. Moreover,
he believes that one must choose between Athens and Jerusalem, as they
"can never be blended together into a lucid and coherent worldview." (p.
86) One can argue that his perspective is dead wrong, or maintain that
it is a lovely idea in principle but just not the way the real world
works. But it is hardly an illegitimate or ignoble way of thinking about
humanity.

To take this matter a step further, Atzmon's book is really all about
Jewish identity. He notes that "the disappearance of the ghetto and its
maternal qualities" in the wake of the French Revolution caused "an
identity crisis within the largely assimilated Jewish society." (p. 104)
He believes that this crisis, about which there is an extensive
literature, is still at the center of Jewish life today. In effect,
Atzmon is telling the story of how he wrestled with his own identity
over time and what he thinks is wrong with how most Jews self-identify
today. It is in this context that he discusses what he calls the
"Holocaust religion," Zionism, and Israel's treatment of the
Palestinians. Again, to be perfectly clear, he has no animus toward
Judaism as a religion or with individuals who are Jewish by birth.
Rather, his target is the tribalism that he believes is common to most
Jews, and I might add, to most other peoples as well. Atzmon focuses on
Jews for the obvious reason that he is Jewish and is trying to make
sense of his own identity.

In sum, Goldberg's charge that Atzman is a Holocaust denier or an
apologist for Hitler is baseless. Nor is Atzmon an anti-Semite. He has
controversial views for sure and he sometimes employs overly provocative
language. But there is no question in my mind that he has written a
fascinating book that, as I said in my blurb, "should be widely read by
Jews and non-Jews alike." Regarding Goldberg's insinuation that I have
any sympathy for Holocaust denial and am an anti-Semite, it is just
another attempt in his longstanding effort to smear Steve Walt and me.

But, on March 13, 2010, he began developing considerations of a
revisionist nature (in the long quotation here, I have quoted what seem
to me the most significant parts of this change of attitude).

"When I was young and naïve I regarded history as a serious academic
matter. As I understood it, history had something to do with truth
seeking, documents, chronology and facts. I was convinced that history
aimed to convey a sensible account of the past based on methodical
research. I also believed that it was premised on the assumption that
understanding the past may throw some light over our present and even
help us to shape a prospect of a better future. I grew up in the Jewish
state and it took me quite a while to understand that the Jewish
historical narrative is very different. In the Jewish intellectual
ghetto, one decides what the future ought to be, then one constructs ‘a
past’ accordingly. Interestingly enough, this exact method is also
prevalent amongst Marxists. They shape the past so it fits nicely into
their vision of the future. As the old Russian joke says, ‘when the
facts do not conform with the Marxist ideology, the Communist social
scientists amend the facts (rather than revise the theory)’.

"When I was young, I didn’t think that history was a matter of political
decisions or agreements between a rabid Zionist lobby and its favourite
holocaust survivor. I regarded historians as scholars who engaged in
adequate research following some strict procedures. When I was young I
even considered becoming an historian.

"When I was young and naive I was also somehow convinced that what they
told us about our ‘collective’ Jewish past really happened. I believed
it all, the Kingdom of David, Massada, and then the Holocaust: the soap,
the lampshade*, the death march, the six million.

"As it happened, it took me many years to understand that the Holocaust,
the core belief of the contemporary Jewish faith, was not at all an
historical narrative for historical narratives do not need the
protection of the law and politicians. It took me years to grasp that my
great-grand-mother wasn’t made into a ‘soap’ or a ‘lamp-shade’*. She
probably perished out of exhaustion, typhus or maybe even by mass
shooting. This was indeed bad and tragic enough, however not that
different from the fate of many millions of Ukrainians who learned what
communism meant for real. ‘Some of the worst mass murderers in history
were Jews’ writes Zionist Sever Plocker on the Israeli Ynet disclosing
the Holodomor and Jewish involve-ment in this colossal crime, proba-bly
the greatest crime of the 20th century.

"The fate of my great-grand-mother was not any different from hundreds
of thousands of German civilians who died in an orchestrated
indiscriminate bombing, because they were Germans. Similarly, people in
Hiroshima died just because they were Japanese. 1 million Vietnamese
died just because they were Vietnamese and 1.3 million Iraqis died
because they were Iraqis. In short the tragic circumstances of my great
grandmother wasn’t that special after all.

"It doesn’t make sense.

"It took me years to accept that the Holocaust narrative, in its current
form, doesn’t make any historical sense. Here is just one little
anecdote to elaborate on:

"If, for instance, the Nazis wanted the Jews out of their Reich
(Judenrein - free of Jews), or even dead, as the Zionist narrative
insists, how come they marched hundreds of thousands of them back into
the Reich at the end of the war? I have been concerned with this simple
question for more than a while. I eventually launched into an historical
research of the topic and happened to learn from Israeli Holocaust
historian professor Israel Gutman that Jewish prisoners actually joined
the march voluntarily. Here is a testimony taken from Gutman’s book:

"‘One of my friends and relatives in the camp came to me on the night of
the evacuation and offered a common hiding place somewhere on the way
from the camp to the factory.… The intention was to leave the camp with
one of the convoys and to escape near the gate, using the darkness we
thought to go a little far from the camp. The temptation was very
strong. And yet, after I considered it all I then decided to join (the
march) with all the other inmates and to share their fate’ (Israel
Gutman [editor], People and Ashes: Book Auschwitz-Birkenau, Merhavia 1957).

"I am left puzzled here, if the Nazis ran a death factory in
Auschwitz-Birkenau, why would the Jewish prisoners join them at the end
of the war? Why didn’t the Jews wait for their Red liberators?

"I think that 65 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, we must be
entitled to start to ask the necessary questions. We should ask for some
conclusive historical evdence and arguments rather than follow a
religious narrative that is sustained by political pressure and laws. We
should strip the holocaust of its Judeo-centric exceptional status and
treat it as an historical chapter that belongs to a certain time and place.

"Sixty-five years after the liberation of Auschwitz we should reclaim
our history and ask why? Why were the Jews hated? Why did European
people stand up against their next door neighbours? Why are the Jews
hated in the Middle East, surely they had a chance to open a new page in
their troubled history? If they genuinely planned to do so, as the early
Zionists claimed, why did they fail? Why did America tighten its
immigration laws amid the growing danger to European Jews? We should
also ask for what purpose do the holocaust denial laws serve? What is
the holocaust religion there to conceal? As long as we fail to ask
questions, we will be subjected to Zionists and their Neocons agents’
plots. We will continue killing in the name of Jewish suffering. We will
maintain our complicity in Western imperialist crimes against humanity.

"As devastating as it may be, at a certain moment in time, a horrible
chapter was given an exceptionally meta-historical status. Its
‘factuality’ was sealed by draconian laws and its reasoning was secured
by social and political settings. The Holocaust became the new Western
religion. Unfortunately, it is the most sinister religion known to man.
It is a license to kill, to flatten, no [sic, for to] nuke, to wipe, to
rape, to loot and to ethnically cleanse. It made vengeance and revenge
into a Western value. However, far more concerning is the fact that it
robs humanity of its heritage, it is there to stop us from looking into
our past with dignity. Holocaust religion robs humanity of its humanism.
For the sake of peace and future generations, the holocaust must be
stripped of its exceptional status immediately. It must be subjected to
thorough historical scrutiny. Truth and truth seeking is an elementary
human experience. It must prevail."

"AIPAC leaders are clearly repeating the grave mistakes of their
forbearers [sic, for forebears]: the American Jewish Congress. They do
not learn from their history, for there is not a single Jewish history
text to learn from. Instead of a history text, Jews have the Holocaust,
an event that matured into a religion. – The holocaust religion is
obviously Judeo-centric to the bone. It defines the Jewish Raison
d'être. For the Jews it signifies a total fatigue of the Diaspora, it
regards the Goy as a potential ‘irrational’ murderer. The new Jewish
religion preaches revenge. It even establishes a new Jewish God. Instead
of old Yehova, the new Jewish God is ‘the Jew’ himself: the brave and
witty being, the one who survived the ultimate and most sinister
genocide, the one who came out of the ashes and stepped forward into a
new beginning.

"To a certain extent the Holocaust religion signals the Jewish departure
from monotheism, for every Jew is a potential little God or Goddess.
Gilad Shalit is the God ‘innocence’, Abe Foxman is the God anti
Semitism, Maddof [sic, for Madoff] is the God of swindling, Greenspan is
the God of ‘good economy’, Lord Goldsmith is the God of the ‘green
light’, Lord Levy is the God of fundraising, Wolfowitz is the God of new
American expansionism and AI-PAC is the American Olympus where American
elected human beings come to ask for mercy and forgiveness for being
Goyim and for daring to occasionally tell the truth about Israel. –

"The holocaust religion is the conclusive stage in the Jewish
dia-lectic; it is the end of Jewish his-tory for it is the deepest and
most sincere form of ‘self love’. Rather than inventing an abstract God
who prefers the Jews to be the chosen people, in the holocaust religion
the Jews cut out the divine middle sub-stance. The Jew just chooses
one-self [sic, for himself]. This is why Jewish identity politics
transcends itself beyond the notion of history. God is the master of
ceremony. And the new Jewish God cannot be subject to humanly contingent
oc-currences.

"The new Jewish God, i.e. ‘the Jew’, just re-writes fables that serve
the tribe at any given time. This may explain why the Holocaust religion
is protected by laws, while every other historical chapter and narrative
is debated openly by his-torians, intellectuals and ordinary people. –
As one may guess, with such a self-centered intensive world-view, not
much room is left for humanity, grace or universal-ism. It is far from
being clear whether Jews can collectively re-cover from their new
religion. However, it is crucial that every humanist stands up against
the holocaust religion that can only spread misery, death and carnage."

In 1993, Joel Hayward completed an MA thesis on the literature of
holocaust revisionism. Hayward was of Jewish descent, was a member of
the New Zealand Friends of Israel, and a co-founder of Opposition to
Anti-Semitism. Yet in the course of his studies, he had come to regard
holocaust revisionist literature as making some valid points. It was a
controversial conclusion that nonetheless garnered Hayward First Class
Honors. When in the year 2000 a University “embargo” on public release
had expired, the NZ Jewish Council, and Professor Dov Bing of Waikato
University launched a campaign to have Hayward’s Masterate revoked. The
matter was made public by Bing, presumably on the safe assumption that
the news media could be relied upon to mindlessly smear Hayward, which
it duly did.[1]

Although Bing, et al, failed to have Hayward’s Masterate revoked on the
grounds of “dishonesty” (because there was nothing of a dishonest nature
in the thesis – obviously) the Working Party Report agonized over
Hayward having been permitted to undertake that course of research in
the first place. The citadels of “Higher Learning” are apparently
intended to be of limited enquiry.

Hayward was harassed, threatened, and had several nervous breakdowns. He
had to resign from his position as lecturer of defense at Massey
University, Palmerton North, and became unemployable in New Zealand.[2]
A few years later he went to the UK and obtained a prestigious post in
academe. As for Dov Bing, he was not about to let the matter drop,
despite Hayward’s retraction of some of his conclusions in the Thesis.
Over the course of more than a decade Bing has continued to milk the
Hayward matter for all its worth.[3]

This paper deals with the Zionist clique that targeted Hayward and
others, in relation to the experiences of this writer with the same
interests, for the purposes of examining a common modus operandi. The
opinions are intended as hypothesis.

Hayward – Muslim Convert – Again Draws Wrath

Move forward to the present, and Hayward is again being pilloried in
what appears to be another campaign to have his academic career wrecked.
A feature in The Daily Mail is provocatively entitled: “Ayatollah of the
RAF. Academic University Head is Muslim convert. Who claims Nazi gas
chambers were British propaganda and criticizes Libya air strikes.”[4]

The article claims that Dr Hayward, Dean at Cranwell College, where
British pilots are trained, is a convert to Islam who has taken a
critical line on the NATO and UN bombing of Libya, and questioned
whether the British air force should be placed at the service of a rebel
army. Hayward is reported to have written in a magazine article that:
“The West runs the risks of its good intentions (and inconsistencies)
leading to distrust,” in its bombing of Libya.[5]

The Daily Mail claims that Hayward’s views have caused disquiet among
“senior officers at RAF Cranwell, Lincolnshire,” where Hayward is the
senior academic and was involved with the tutoring of Prince William.
From here the article proceeds with smears that I believe lack
plausibility:

In a letter to The Mail on Sunday entitled “The Air Force Ayatollah,”
one senior officer expressed concern that Dr Hayward was focusing more
on ‘Islamist activities that are nothing to do with the RAF’.

He also accused him of giving Muslim cadets preferential treatment and
making other students take a ‘softly, softly line when writing about
Muslim terrorists/Islamist extremists’.

Another officer claimed cadets and lecturers ‘are in fear’ of expressing
anything that might be construed as anti-Muslim sentiment. ‘Anyone who
fails to follow the line that Islam is a peace-loving religion is hauled
into his office for re-education,’ he said.

Last night Dr Hayward said he did not ‘recognize’ the allegations.[6]

The article states that,

Dr Hayward was appointed to RAF Cranwell in 2007, but was investigated
the following year over complaints of ‘harassment and bullying’. It is
not clear what became of the investigation. He is employed not by the
RAF but by King’s College, London, which runs academic courses at
Cranwell.[7]

The questions that should arise are not in regard to the dubious claims
against Hayward’s character, but about whether complaints that started
the year after his appointment to Cranwell were motivated by his having
displeased certain interests in New Zealand? Given what this writer
personally knows about those involved in the harassment of Hayward in
New Zealand, I feel that it is a legitimate question.

Hayward is presumably in a good position to try to mitigate the
anti-Islamic propaganda that is feeding the “clash of civilizations.”
Having been hounded for years for his thesis on holocaust revisionism,
knowing that he is under constant scrutiny by Zionists, it takes courage
for Hayward to have his views on Islam published. He has set up a
website called “Islam & War” which includes an essay by him entitled
“The Qour’an and War: Observations on Island Just War.”[8]

Dov Bing & Dennis Green

Dr Hayward’s predicament goes back to his student days at Christchurch,
New Zealand. Dr Dennis Green, later to serve as a religious studies
lecturer at Waikato University, Hamilton, and now touring the world
engaged in something he calls “anarchaeology,” had been a student with
Hayward at Canterbury University. They had formed a group, Opposition to
Anti-Semitism. The Christchurch Press reported at the time of Hayward’s
thesis debacle:

In May 1992, the university received a letter from an organization
called Opposition to Anti-Semitism Inc (OAS). The group, based in
Christchurch, was concerned about the direction Dr Hayward was taking in
his then half-completed thesis.

Ironically, OAS had been formed a year earlier by Dr Hayward with Yossie
EtzHasadeh (previously Philip Woodfield of Christchurch, now in Israel)
and Denis Green.

The organization’s goal was to monitor anti-Semitic groups in New
Zealand and warn people about Holocaust revisionism. Several members
were converting to Judaism. Joel Hayward resigned from the group before
he started his thesis.

He says he left OAS because of a personality clash.

OAS members soon became worried about the path Dr Hayward’s thesis was
taking and arranged to meet him. Dr Hayward says he went along on
January 30, 1992, to what he thought was an ordinary afternoon tea with
friends. As they talked about his half-completed master’s thesis a video
camera hidden behind a hollowed out book recorded the entire conversation.

Dr Hayward says a selective 13-minute transcript was made of the
three-hour conversation by the OAS. “They only included statements that
cast me in the worst possible light.”

The group sent Canterbury University registrar Alan Hayward (no
relation) parts of the transcript with a letter detailing concerns about
Joel Hayward’s views on the Holocaust.

Dr Hayward did not find out about the video until two months after it
was made. He considers the taping dishonest and unfair and says he
nearly had a breakdown as a result.[9]

It was as a religious studies lecturer at Waikato University that Green
is acknowledged by a certain R W Van Leeuwen as being “the man who
planted the seed” for a fraudulently contrived Masterate thesis that Van
Leeuwen completed in 2008. Furthermore, Van Leeuwen’s co-supervisor was
Prof. Dov Bing, lecturer on Political Science and Public Policy at
Waikato University.[10]

Dov Bing is a very active Zionist and apologist for Israel. He has been
involved not only in the Hayward matter, but in the debacles concerning
German student Hans Kupka, and Auckland Herald cartoonist Malcolm Evans.

It is in the matter of the Van Leeuwen thesis that I know something
personally of the nature of Bing’s attitudes and tactics. The events
acting against Hayward, Kupka, and starting from 2008 against this
writer, follow similar scenarios.

Dr Hayward wrote on his “old website” of what he endured in New Zealand:

Most of the garbage I received was unimaginative and only semi-literate,
and phrases like “hope you die,” “you’ll get yours,” “die scum!,” “rot
in hell,” and “we’ll be waiting for you outside your work” seemed so
common that, had the calls and mail not come from different parts of New
Zealand or been sent from many different email addresses, I probably
would have concluded that they came from one small group of hate-filled
people.

Some of this mail even came from a senior academic at another New
Zealand university, and, with full specifics, I reported that academic’s
behavior and mail to the Working Party. I felt so distressed by some of
the mail that, in a letter to the Head of the Working Party, Sir Ian
Barker, dated 1 August 2000, I pointed out my concerns. Sir Ian told me
during our interview on 10 October that he shared my grave concerns.[11]

The Working Part Report on Dr Hayward referred to this matter of
vindictive e-mails, stating:

2.47: On 2 October 1999, Dr Hayward received what he describes as the
first of many e-mails from Professor Dov Bing, Professor of Political
Studies at the University of Waikato…. Dr Hayward claimed that he had
received several nasty e-mails from anonymous persons and was concerned
at what action might be taken by Professor Bing and NZJC [NZ Jewish
Council]….[12] ...

About Me

'Mission statement'.
I am convinced that jewish individuals and groups have an enormous influence on the world. The MSM are, for almost all people, the only source of information, and these are largely controlled by jewish people.
So there is a huge under-reporting on jewish influence in the world.
I see it as my mission to try to close this gap. To quote Henry Ford: "Corral the 50 wealthiest jews and there will be no wars." `(Thomas Friedman wrote the same in Haaretz, about the war against Iraq! See yellow marked area, blog 573)
If that is true, my mission must be very beneficial to humanity.